Bhopal: Unending Disaster, Enduring Resistance by Bridget Hanna Forthcoming in Nongovermental Politics Edited by Michel Feher, Zone Books, April 2007
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Bhopal: Unending Disaster, Enduring Resistance by Bridget Hanna forthcoming in Nongovermental Politics edited by Michel Feher, Zone Books, April 2007 Introduction On March 23, 2006, fifty survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster and subsequent water contamination trudged into New Delhi and requested a meeting with the prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh. The Bhopal disaster occurred in 1984, when the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) pesticide plant leaked 40 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) into the city of Bhopal, exposing 500,000 people to the toxic gas. The fifty survivors, several in their eighties, had walked all the way from Bhopal, sleeping on the side of the road and covering over 500 miles on foot. Their demands were chillingly simple: a commission to administer their relief and medical care, the provision of safe drinking water, and the active prosecution of those criminally accused of being responsible for the disaster, which has killed at least 20,000 people to date.[1] They also demanded environmental remediation of the factory, a national day of mourning for the victims, and the disaster's inclusion in school curricula. Finally, they wanted the prime minister to pursue — and blacklist, if possible — the corporation liable for the disaster, Union Carbide Corporation USA, owned since 2001 by the Dow Chemical Company. These demands were not new. Most of them had been on the survivors’ agenda since at least 1991. But this time, after waiting twenty-seven days, three survivors, three Indian activists, and two international supporters of the survivors, who were all on an indefinite hunger strike, were granted a meeting with the prime minister. On April 17, Prime Minister Singh granted all of their demands, with the caveat that the government would do nothing "extralegal" in pursuit of Union Carbide, whose factory had originally caused the disaster, or its current parent company, Dow Chemical. It had been twenty-one years and over five months since the disaster occurred. Why would it take twenty-one years to meet such basic demands? And twenty-one years after the Bhopal disaster, when most people around the world believe it to be ancient history, how could the Bhopal movement be strong enough, suddenly, to win their demands? Contrary to popular belief, the situation in Bhopal has gotten worse, not better, over the past two decades, especially the problem of water contamination. The deteriorating environmental conditions, combined with delayed justice and the ambitious but bungled government rehabilitation efforts, have given survivors a political education to go along with their anger and suffering. With every passing year that issues remain unresolved in the Bhopal case, the stakes are heightened for its eventual resolution. Everyone involved — the victims of chemical exposure, the government of India, and the corporation — understands that their continued survival or legitimacy may hang on the final outcome of the Bhopal problems. The first half of this article, which includes part 1,“Disaster,” and part 2, “Governmental Interventions,” covers the basic aspects of the disaster and its aftermath. These sections outline the historical facts and controversies but pay particular attention to the role of the Indian government, its convoluted relationship to UCC and to the United States government, and to the logic of its relief efforts in Bhopal. Part 3, “Survivors' Movements,” looks at the evolution of the survivors' movement in Bhopal and their progressive politicization and articulation of rights, developed in relation to the combination of official negligence, corruption, and governmental patronage that they have endured. Finally, part 4, “Impacts,” discusses the Bhopal crisis as a stimulus for the formation of new networks, alternative activist formats, and expanded targets for activist intervention. In sum, I show how the constellation of government, corporate power, and development projects have laid the groundwork for a marginalized group of people from central India to form the center of a political movement, which incorporates their daily crises into a powerful and international critique of the chemical industry and the corporate system. Part One: Disaster 1. Hazardous Production In the late 1960s, Union Carbide Corporation built a small factory at the edge of the city of Bhopal, India. It formulated the carbamate pesticide Sevin for sale on the Indian market, and imported its most hazardous components, phosgene and methyl isocyanate, in small batches. In 1972, company engineers proposed upgrading the facility so that they could also produce these hazardous ingredients on site, and thus increase output of Sevin. The plans for the upgrade were drafted by Union Carbide USA, and vetted by, among others, the company's future CEO, Warren Anderson. The technology proposed for the upgrade was inferior to that utilized in UCC's American operations, and the proposal detailed inherent risks to this plan that could have been mitigated "had proven technology been used throughout."[2] The UCC designers also noted that the proposed waste disposal system, solar evaporation ponds, posed the "danger of polluting subsurface water supplies."[3] In addition, highly unstable MIC was to be stored in an unnecessarily large tank — constructed despite internal objections — in part because UCC policy provided pay incentives to the board for producing larger infrastructure.[4] Bhopal is the capital of Madhya Pradesh (“middle province”), a lush agricultural state sometimes referred to as the "breadbasket of India." Union Carbide viewed India, especially Madhya Pradesh, as the next big market for Sevin. At the time of the Bhopal disaster, the government of the Republic of India, a young democracy, was struggling between the desire to industrialize and attract foreign investments, and the need to manifest independence and autonomy from foreign interference. A few years earlier, the Indian parliament had passed the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), which aimed to increase state control over foreign business ventures. The act reduced the amount of equity that a foreign corporation could provide to any given project, in order to dilute foreign ownership of Indian-based firms. The bill also strongly encouraged the transfer of proprietary production technology to Indian firms, rather than just the formulation and sale of products, so that it could lay the groundwork for eventually nationalizing such technologies. In the case of the Bhopal plant however, UCC wanted to retain control of both the project and the technologies they had invented. While FERA did not allow foreign corporations to be the majority stakeholder in a project, an exception was made for UCC on the grounds that it was bringing in “special technology.” In order to retain their 50.9 percent stake in the undertaking, UCC cut the cost of construction from $28 million to $20 million dollars, primarily by using substandard technology and cheaper materials.[5] Although UCC claims that its plant in Bhopal was built to the same safety specifications as its American facilities, when it was finally constructed there were at least eleven significant differences in safety and maintenance policies between the Bhopal factory and its sister facility in Institute, West Virginia. For example, the West Virginia plant had an emergency plan, computer monitoring, and used inert chloroform for cooling their MIC tanks. Bhopal had no emergency plan, no computer monitoring, and used brine, a substance that may dangerously react with MIC, for its cooling system. The Union Carbide Karamchari Sangh (Workers’ Union), a union of Bhopal workers that formed in the early 1980s, recognized the dangers at the factory but their agitation for safer conditions produced no changes.[6] 2. "Green Revolution" The economic rationale for the construction of the Bhopal factory was the demand for pesticides engineered by the "green revolution," a massive, internationally sponsored shift in agricultural practices. The "green revolution" was set in motion in India (and other developing nations) during the 1960s and 1970s by an alliance of governments, multinational corporations, and world development and trade agencies. Under the banner of the eradication of food shortages, the "green revolution" purposefully disrupted the small-scale, manual, multicrop, organic agriculture that had developed in India over thousands of years, in favor of large-scale, monocrop, chemically and mechanically maintained agriculture. Unfortunately, the "green revolution" did not succeed in eliminating hunger, and by the late 1970s many had already become disillusioned with its promises. The economic, political, and health toll of these often unsustainable initiatives became quickly apparent. Most of these costs were borne by peasant farmers, who were displaced from their small plots of land when mechanized agriculture began to demand huge land holdings. In Madhya Pradesh, the peasant population migrated to cities like Bhopal, settling densely on the outskirts in illegal squatters' colonies (bastis), and doing day labor to survive. Though usually tolerated by the government as potential labor pools and vote banks, these settlements were not entitled to state services like sewage, piped water, or roads, and could be demolished at the whim of an official. Additionally, most of those who lived there did not possess the documents of citizenship, like birth, marriage, or death certificates, which would later become crucial to proving the right